Smells, odours, fragrances and scents

”It smells like Africa.” I remember having this lovely cliché in my mind when descending from the plane at the airport of Dakar 7 weeks ago. A similar general mixed smell of earth, wind and fire (!) might exist in other continents on the same climat zone, but having only been to Europe, Africa and North America so far, for me it is the smell of Africa, both East and West.

I take it as a sign of acculturation to be able to distinguish smells related to Senegalese food: I can tell now whether the restaurant at work place is preparing the most common dish, fish with rice (tiepboudjen) or maybe peanut sauce with rice (mafe). While walking on the street, I recognize the smell of the little meat/fish pies, fried in oil and stuffed with spicy onion-tomato sauce. The smell of the Senegalese tea (ataaya) is also easily distinguishable with a strong smell of - well, less surprisingly - tea, with several (dozen) spoonfuls of sugar and fresh leaves of mint.

Unfortunately, most of the time the smells tend to be quite unpleasant. Garbage smells. Horse poop smells. Toilets smell. In fact, one of the things I was worried about when hearing that I would have the luxury of a proper in-door toilet in my one-room apartment: would it not be actually better to have the toilet outside in the case it stinks? To my great relief, my bathroom happens to have one of the least-smelliest toilets I have encountered so far in Senegal. Yay, one of the little joys in life in Senegal!

If my speculations and sense of smell are correct, there are clear cultural differences between African countries. In Benin I often marvelled how good most people there smelt (excluding moped taxi drivers after a full work day), but in Senegal it is generally only the women who smell nice.

To put it bluntly, many Senegalese men stink :) The purity prescriptions for prayer five times a day only include washing hands, feet and face, thus leaving the really smelly parts unwashed. In Benin people used to have showers in the morning, during the siesta in the afternoon and again in the evening, including whole body (well, they said they were going to take a shower so I take it means a complete shower). It could also be that the bad-smelling men render the more fragrant odours coming from the opposite sex even more noticeable: is this the difference made between men and women in Senegal?

Sometimes the women smell even a bit too nice in their big dresses infested in incense and perfume. The incense business is especially big here: women use different concoctions of "thiouraye", incenses sold on the street or in special shops. Besides beauty purposes, incenses are used for all ceremonies: baptemes, funerals, weddings...I have not yet assisted any ceremonies, so I have not been able to compare the incenses of ritual purposes to those used for seduction.

While in Zanzibar there were only a few options to choose from, here it is a whole brand of industry to choose from different fragrances, dried or fresh. Apparently men know which mixture or "brand" their wives are using in a similar fashion as many Westerners would know what perfume their wives or husbands use: I testified one man buying nonchalantly a specific incense in a small shop specialized in incenses and other beauty products.

As a fan of Senegalese wresting, I could not resist buying myself a small glass jar of a fresh, unidentified green concoction of incense called ”grand combat”. Its smell penetrates even the glass jar in a plastic bag, making me wonder whether I will ever be able to actually burn it. I reluctantly bought quite an ugly incense burner to be used with coals. The other option was electric, but made in China and I have a tendency to avoid those products here with no proper safety standards, stuff just dumped to the market.

In any case, I hope to resemble - odour-wise, at least - more the Senegalese women than the men in the future.


The glass jar with unidentified green stuff and the burner to be used with coal.